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π Εmoto
Oomoto (ε€§ζ¬, Εmoto, Great Source, or Great Origin), also known as Oomoto-kyo (ε€§ζ¬ζ, Εmoto-kyΕ), is a religion founded in 1892 by Deguchi Nao (1836β1918), often categorised as a new Japanese religion originated from Shinto. The spiritual leaders of the movement have predominantly been women; however, Deguchi OnisaburΕ (1871β1948) has been considered an important figure in Omoto as a seishi (spiritual teacher). Since 2001, the movement has been guided by its fifth leader, Kurenai Deguchi.
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- "Εmoto" | 2018-02-05 | 47 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Jackson structured programming
Jackson structured programming (JSP) is a method for structured programming developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson and described in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design. The technique of JSP is to analyze the data structures of the files that a program must read as input and produce as output, and then produce a program design based on those data structures, so that the program control structure handles those data structures in a natural and intuitive way.
JSP describes structures (of both data and programs) using three basic structures β sequence, iteration, and selection (or alternatives). These structures are diagrammed as (in effect) a visual representation of a regular expression.
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- "Jackson structured programming" | 2021-08-12 | 106 Upvotes 69 Comments
π Jimmy Carter rabbit incident
The Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, sensationalized as the "killer rabbit attack" by the press, involved a swamp rabbit (Sylvilagus aquaticus) that swam toward then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat on April 20, 1979. The incident caught the imagination of the media after Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, mentioned the event to a correspondent months later.
Political opponents argued that the incident was symbolic of Carter's purported weakness. According to Powell, anti-Carter political commentators went so far as to blame it for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis.
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- "Jimmy Carter rabbit incident" | 2023-08-02 | 12 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Mellified man
A mellified man, or a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources, most significantly the Bencao Gangmu of the 16th-century Chinese medical doctor and pharmacologist Li Shizhen. Relying on a second-hand account, Li reports a story that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection.
This process differed from a simple body donation because of the aspect of self-sacrifice; the mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, his feces (and even his sweat, according to legend) would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor's body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey.
After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs and other ailments. This confection would then be sold in street markets as a hard to find item with a hefty price.
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- "Mellified man" | 2017-02-14 | 35 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Nunchi
Nunchi, sometimes noonchi, is a Korean concept signifying the subtle art and ability to listen and gauge others' moods. It first appears in the 17th century as nunch'Εi (ηΌε’ in Chinese characters), meaning "eye force/power". In Western culture, nunchi could be described as the concept of emotional intelligence. It is of central importance to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Nunchi is literally translated as "eye-measure". It is closely related to the broader concept of paralanguage, however nunchi also relies on an understanding of one's status relative to the person with whom they're interacting. It can be seen as the embodiment of skills necessary to communicate effectively in high context culture.
The concept of nunchi, and one's abundance or lack thereof, forms the basis of many common expressions and idioms. For example, a socially clumsy person can be described as nunchi eoptta (λμΉ μλ€), meaning "absence of nunchi."
λμΉ Nunchi is briefly defined as the high social sensitivity of Koreans which basically means they are able to ascertain others moods by being around them and talking to them. They are sensitive to what others say indirectly, because they want to maintain harmony. They do this by the use of the skill named "nunchi" which literally means eye measure in Korean, they sense someone's "kibun", Kibun is a Korean word which relates to mood, current feelings, and the state of mind. Facilitating nunchi, encouraging the use of this skill, is expected to result in rich understanding. It is of central importance to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. With nunchi, Koreans are using non-verbal cues to convey emotion and meaning through various means, including voice pitch and volume as well as intonation. Nunchi also relies heavily on an understanding of one's status relative to the person with whom one is interacting. Because Korea, as with other high-context cultures caters toward in-groups that have similar experiences and expectations and from which inferences are drawn, many things are left unsaid here. The culture does the explaining, in effect. Both Kibun and Nunchi are very difficult concepts for non-Koreans to get the hang of and they will generally be forgiven for their ignorance of these concepts and consequent rude behavior, especially if they are high on the status ladder. However, one gains more than one loses by trying to understand and, as much as possible, behaving according to these rules of behavior. In Korea, personal relations frequently take precedence over business. In order to be successful, it is vital to establish good, personal relationships based on mutual trust and benefit Koreans judge this by Nunchi to get a base understanding of the individual they just met. Korean business culture is firmly grounded in respectful rapport and in order to establish this, it is essential to have the right introduction to approach the company. Koreans will use Nunchi to make sure the right approach is being used, often through a mutual friend or acquaintance at the appropriate level. Koreans spend a significant amount of time developing and fostering personal contacts. Therefore, time should be allocated for this process, particularly during the first meeting, which is frequently used to simply establish rapport and build trust.
The phrase λμΉ μλ€ (nunchi itda) refers to someone who's quick witted, can understand the situation quickly, or has common sense. Another way to say this is λμΉ λΉ λ₯΄λ€ (nunchi ppareuda) β to have quick nunchi.
In Korean, the phrase λμΉ μλ€ (nunchi eoptta) refers to someone that is clueless, someone that doesn't know what's going on, or simply doesn't have any common sense basically it is the exact opposite of nunchi or when someones nunchi is lacking.
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- "Nunchi" | 2019-03-24 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Judy arrays are patented
In computer science, a Judy array is a data structure implementing a type of associative array with high performance and low memory usage. Unlike most other key-value stores, Judy arrays use no hashing, leverage compression on their keys (which may be integers or strings), and can efficiently represent sparse data, that is, they may have large ranges of unassigned indices without greatly increasing memory usage or processing time. They are designed to remain efficient even on structures with sizes in the peta-element range, with performance scaling on the order of O(log n). Roughly speaking, Judy arrays are highly optimized 256-ary radix trees.
Judy trees are usually faster than AVL trees, B-trees, hash tables and skip lists because they are highly optimized to maximize usage of the CPU cache. In addition, they require no tree balancing and no hashing algorithm is used.
The Judy array was invented by Douglas Baskins and named after his sister.
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- "Judy arrays are patented" | 2013-01-11 | 42 Upvotes 56 Comments
π Oxford Electric Bell
The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental electric bell that was set up in 1840 and which has run nearly continuously ever since. It was one of the first pieces purchased for a collection of apparatus by clergyman and physicist Robert Walker. It is located in a corridor adjacent to the foyer of the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford, England, and is still ringing, though inaudibly due to being behind two layers of glass.
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- "Oxford Electric Bell" | 2018-10-06 | 109 Upvotes 12 Comments
- "Oxford Electric Bell" | 2014-06-02 | 106 Upvotes 60 Comments
π McCollough effect
The McCollough effect is a phenomenon of human visual perception in which colorless gratings appear colored contingent on the orientation of the gratings. It is an aftereffect requiring a period of induction to produce it. For example, if someone alternately looks at a red horizontal grating and a green vertical grating for a few minutes, a black-and-white horizontal grating will then look greenish and a black-and-white vertical grating will then look pinkish. The effect is remarkable because, where time-elapse testing is employed, it has been reported to last up to 2.8 months.
The effect was discovered by American psychologist Celeste McCollough in 1965.
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- "McCollough effect" | 2016-06-16 | 32 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Council of Trent
The Council of Trent (Latin: Concilium Tridentinum), held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent (or Trento), now in northern Italy, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation at the time, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.
The Council issued condemnations of what it defined to be heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism, and also issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the biblical canon, sacred tradition, original sin, justification, salvation, the sacraments, the Mass, and the veneration of saints. The Council met for twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563. Pope Paul III, who convoked the Council, oversaw the first eight sessions (1545β47), while the twelfth to sixteenth sessions (1551β52) were overseen by Pope Julius III and the seventeenth to twenty-fifth sessions (1562β63) by Pope Pius IV.
The consequences of the Council were also significant with regard to the Church's liturgy and practices. In its decrees, the Council made the Latin Vulgate the official biblical text of the Roman Church (without prejudice to the original texts in Hebrew and Greek, nor to other traditional translations of the Church, but favoring the Latin language over vernacular translations, such as the controversial English-language Tyndale Bible). In doing so, they commissioned the creation of a revised and standardized Vulgate in light of textual criticism, although this was not achieved until the 1590s. The Council also officially affirmed (for the second time at an ecumenical council) the traditional Catholic Canon of biblical books in response to the increasing Protestant exclusion of the deuterocanonical books. The former dogmatic affirmation of the Canonical books was at the Council of Florence in the 1441 bull Cantate Domino, as affirmed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus (#20). In 1565, a year after the Council finished its work, Pius IV issued the Tridentine Creed (after Tridentum, Trent's Latin name) and his successor Pius V then issued the Roman Catechism and revisions of the Breviary and Missal in, respectively, 1566, 1568 and 1570. These, in turn, led to the codification of the Tridentine Mass, which remained the Church's primary form of the Mass for the next four hundred years.
More than three hundred years passed until the next ecumenical council, the First Vatican Council, was convened in 1869.
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- "Council of Trent" | 2023-06-02 | 24 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Ask HN: using only static magnetism - impossible to stably levitate against gravity?
Earnshaw's theorem states that a collection of point charges cannot be maintained in a stable stationary equilibrium configuration solely by the electrostatic interaction of the charges. This was first proven by British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw in 1842. It is usually referenced to magnetic fields, but was first applied to electrostatic fields.
Earnshaw's theorem applies to classical inverse-square law forces (electric and gravitational) and also to the magnetic forces of permanent magnets, if the magnets are hard (the magnets do not vary in strength with external fields). Earnshaw's theorem forbids magnetic levitation in many common situations.
If the materials are not hard, Braunbeck's extension shows that materials with relative magnetic permeability greater than one (paramagnetism) are further destabilising, but materials with a permeability less than one (diamagnetic materials) permit stable configurations.
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- "Earnshaw's Theorem" | 2020-11-14 | 23 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Ask HN: using only static magnetism - impossible to stably levitate against gravity?" | 2009-04-30 | 3 Upvotes 10 Comments